Because of the many delicate manuevers, such as tying sutures, etc. performed by a surgeon, the fit and tactile sensitivity of a surgeon's latex glove is very critical. Particularly critical areas are the glove's palm, finger, and finger tip area. Since surgeon's gloves are sold sterile and disposed of after a single use, it is uneconomical to custom make the size and shape of the surgeon's glove to fit each individual surgeon. Thus, surgeon's glove sizes have developed over the years into 8-10 different sizes designed to fit the general population of surgeons. However, some surgeons find the glove fingers fitting too tightly or too loosely in the knuckle area, fingertip area, or palm area. In the past, several glove structures have been proposed to increase the comfort of fit to the wearer. These have included providing a glove finger that is generally ovaled in a front to rear direction along its length from its tip to its base while providing added material bumps in a first and second knuckle area of the fingers. This is described in the British Pat. No. 809,741. Another example of providing excess material in the knuckle area is in U.S. Pat. No. 1,097,018.
Other glove structures to improve fit comfort have included the provision of reduced diameters, cylindrical fingertip areas (U.S. Pat. No. 2,266,716), fingernail pockets (U.S. Pat. No. 2,056,555), and naturally bent fingers (U.S. Pat. No. 1,294,105). To improve the glove fit in the palm area, it has been proposed to gusset an external surface of the thumb ball area (U.S. Pat. No. 3,602,917), angularly dispose the thumb relative to the fingers (U.S. Pat. No. 3,613,172), and provide a bulged area at a rear wall of the glove palm section (U.S. Pat. No. 3,867,727).